Grumpy Old Men

Charles Hurt:

Here you have two men with 155 years of combined accumulated wisdom here on planet Earth. Together, they have served in Washington a combined 76 years. And they are squabbling like a couple of schoolchildren about irrelevant nonsense on the playground.

The Democrat Party has come to this? Vote for either of these clowns and you beclown yourself.  Sleepy Joe, on the nod, appears to be poised to get the nod. But be prepared for surprises.

The Wages of Frugality

Some of us from modest origins will end up with more money than we will ever need or be able to spend. The wages of our frugality will not be spent by us but passed on to benefit others. We credit our success to the old-time virtues.  We understand that poverty is more a lack of virtue than a lack of money.

But to suggest that blacks could profit from these old-school virtues will get us branded as 'racists.' Apparently, to the mind of  a leftist, a black who can defer gratification is like a black conservative, a 'traitor' to his race, as if race is a political construct. 

Such is the real racism of low expectations fueled by 'progressive' reality denial according to which race is a socio-political construct.

Will Leftists Now Re-Evaluate their Espousal of a “Borderless World”?

We of the Coalition of the Sane understand that one of the many reasons for enforced national borders is to impede the spread of deadly diseases. So I am hoping that such globalist nitwits as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton will learn something from COVID-19.  They will perhaps learn the importance of border control. If they do, something good will have come of the Wuhan virus.  One can hope.  Here's a report on something the illustrious Mr. Kerry said a few years back:

Taking a jab at Donald Trump for promising that Mexico would pay for a wall on the Rio Grande, the secretary [Kerry] enthused over his vision of a borderless world, and hectored those reluctant to join his flight to Utopia. Once offstage, Mr. Kerry ducked into an armored vehicle surrounded by heavily armed guards who shepherded him from one secure place to the next, and then home, where he could relax behind sturdy walls.

In other words, borders and guns for us, but not for you "bitter clingers" (Obama) and "deplorables" (Hillary). 

Just remember, folks, political correctness can get you killed. "Killed dead," as a deplorable might say.

Intellectual Integrity and the Appeal to Mystery

Bradley Schneider writes,

. . . while we're on the subject of divine simplicity, I would be interested in your thoughts on the following dilemma.  Suppose you are strongly persuaded by philosophical arguments that, if God exists, God must be simple, i.e., some version of DDS must be true.  Otherwise, if God were composite, He would not be absolute and therefore would not be God.  At the same time, you appreciate the problem of modal collapse.  That is, you appreciate that DDS appears to imply modal collapse.  Suppose further that you are convinced that modal fatalism cannot be true, i.e,. the world that we inhabit is both ontologically and modally contingent.  Question: Can you, with intellectual integrity, believe in or have faith in God's existence in this scenario?  It seems to me that you can if you accept the following:  (a) DDS is true; (b) DDS does not imply modal collapse; and (c) the reason DDS does not imply modal collapse is a mystery beyond human comprehension.  

 
Is that a reasonable position or an intellectual evasion?  Put another way:  There are obviously some philosophical assertions that are so demonstrably incoherent or contradictory that one cannot hold them with intellectual integrity, e.g., "There is no truth," "I have no beliefs," etc.  Is the belief that [DDS does not imply modal collapse and the reason is a mystery] analogous to such beliefs?  When is it reasonable to believe in something that you don't understand? 
 
Well, Bradley, you are asking the right questions.  The central question, I take it, is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.
 
To affirm mysterianism is to affirm that there are mysteries.  But what is a mystery?

Mystery-1:  A proposition which, if true, is knowable, presently unknown, and interesting to know, but the interest of which evaporates upon being known.  For example, the proposition Jimmy Hoffa's body was fed through a wood chipper is, if true, knowable, unknown, interesting to know but such that, if it came to be known, then the question of the final disposition of Hoffa's body would be settled and would no longer be interesting or a mystery.  The aim of scientific research is to banish mysteries in this first sense of 'mystery.'   Perhaps we could say that this is the Enlightenment Project in a nutshell: to de-mystify the world.  The presupposition that guides the project is that nothing is intrinsically mysterious or impervious in principle to being understood; there are no mysteries in reality.  Accordingly, all mystery is parasitic upon our ignorance which, in principle, can be overcome.

Mystery-2:  A proposition which, if true, cannot by us in this life be known to be true, and cannot even be known by us in this life to be logically-possibly true, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and is of the highest interest to us, but whose interest would in no way be diminished should we come to know it.

An example of mystery-2 is the doctrine of the Trinity as understood by Roman Catholics (but not just by them).  The Trinity is an exclusively revealed truth; hence it cannot be known by us by natural means.  What's more, it cannot even be known by us to be free of logical contradiction and thus logically possible.  Our finite intellects cannot see into its logical possibility let alone into its actual truth.  We cannot understand how it is possible.  But what is actual is possible whether or not we have the power to understand how it is possible. 

(Compare: motion is possible because actual, whether or not the Zenonian arguments to the contrary can be adequately answered.  Someone who is convinced by the Zenonian arguments, but who refuses to deny the reality of motion, is a mysterian about the reality of motion.  He is saying: Motion must appear to us as logically impossible; yet motion is actual and therefore possible  despite our inability to explain how it is possible. This mysterian could easily grant that the irrefutability ofthe Zenonian arguments is excellent evidence of the unreality of motion but still insist that motion is real.  He might say: the considerations of our paltry intellects must give way before the massive evidence of the senses: you can see that I am wagging my finger at you now. The evidence of the senses trumps all arguments no matter how compelling they seem. Similarly, the believer in the triune God could say that God's revelation trumps all merely human animadversions.)

So from the fact that the Trinity appears to us in our present state as contradictory, and thus as logically impossible, it does not follow that it is not true.  For it could be like this:  given our unalterable ('hard-wired') cognitive architecture, certain revealed truths must appear to us as contradictory when the propositions which must so appear are not only in themselves not contradictory, but are also actually true!

The philosophical mysterian is a person who holds that there are mysteries in the second sense.  Is Colin McGinn a mysterian in this sense? 

McGinn 'takes it on faith' as a teaching of the scientific magisterium that all mental activity is brain activity. He no more questions this than a believing Catholic questions the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence, etc.   It just seems obvious to him and therefore a thesis that cannot be reasonably questioned.  Of course mental activity is brain activity!  What the hell else could it be?  You think and feel with your brain not with some 'spook in the skull' (my coinage) or "ghost in the machine." (Ryle) There is one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it. And so consciousness, self-consciousness, qualia, intentionality, conscience must all be reducible without remainder to physical processes and states.

But there are powerful arguments which I have rehearsed many times why qualia and object-directed mental states cannot be physical states.  Confronted with these arguments, McGinn goes mysterian.  He grants their force and then says something like this:

It is incomprehensible to us how consciousness could be a brain process.  But it is a brain process.  It is just that our unalterable cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to see into this truth.  It is true and therefore possibly true even though we cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true due to our cognitive limitations.

As I read McGinn, these limitations are in our human case unalterable.  And so I read McGinn as a mysterian in much the same sense that a theological mysterian is a mysterian.  What is common to the doctor angelicus and the decidedly less than angelic McGinn is a commitment to the thesis that there are true, non-contradictory propositions that we humans by our very nature are not equipped to understand as either true or non-contradictory.  Access denied!  We have no access to certain truths because of our cognitive make-up. 

This leaves open the possibility for McGinn that there be extraterrestrials who are equipped to grasp mind-brain identity.  And it leaves open for Aquinas the possibility that there be angelic intellects who are equipped to grasp and wholly understand Trinity,  God-Man identity (the Incarnation) and how Jesus Christ could ascend into  heaven soul and body!

But let's return to  the doctrine of the Trinity. We are assuming that it is apparently contradictory, and that attempts to relieve the apparent contradictoriness fail.  See The Logic of the Trinity Revisited in which I spell out the doctrine, show the (apparent) contradiction, and rebut a couple of quick responses to it. Now consider the following position:
 
The Trinity doctrine appears contradictory to us (ectypal) intellects, and must so appear in our present state due to cognitive limitations endemic in our sublunary, and presumably fallen, condition. (Sin has noetic consequences.) In reality, however, the doctrine is internally consistent and each of its component propositions is true.  It is just that we cannot understand, in our present state, how the doctrine could be true. So, in our present postlapsarian and pre-salvific state, the Trinity must remain a mystery.  The claim is not that the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction; there are no true contradictions, pace Graham Priest and his tiny band of dialetheists.  The claim is that the Trinity doctrine is true and non-contradictory, but not such as to be understandable as true and non-contradictory by us in this life. On the contrary, it must appear to us as contradictory and false in this life.
 
Following Dale Tuggy, we may call the position I have just sketched positive mysterianism.  In critique of it, Tuggy says this:
 
Positive mysterianism must leap this hurdle: if this Dogma [Trinity] resolutely appears contradictory, doesn’t that give us a strong reason to think it false? How then, [can] this admission be part of a defense of the rationality of believing in this Dogma?
The admission is that the doctrine appears contradictory to us.  But this admission is not part of the defense of the rationality of believing the doctrine. Presumably, only a latter-day Tertullian would defend the rationality of belief in a doctrine on the ground of the doctrine's appearing absurd, i.e., logically contradictory, or actually being absurd.  No one will say, "It is rational for me to believe that p precisely because, after careful and protracted consideration, it appears to me that p is or entails a logical contradiction."
 
The positive mysterian (PM) is not defending the doctrine on the ground that it appears contradictory. The PM is defending the doctrine on the ground that what appears contradictory might not be contradictory. The PM, in other words, is appealing to the possibility that there are certain non-contradictory truths that must appear to us in our present state as contradictory.
 
Is that possibility one that can be dismissed at the outset?  Can one be objectively certain that there cannot be truths that are reasonable to affirm but must appear to us as contradictory?
 
The PM can grant to Tuggy that, in general, a doctrine's appearing to be contradictory is a strong reason for thinking it false while insisting that the appearance of contradictoriness does not entail the reality of contradictoriness.  A strong reason needn't be a rationally compelling reason. Can Tuggy & Co. be objectively certain that the Trinity doctrine is contradictory and necessarily false simply on the basis of its appearing to be such to us in our present state?  No, they can't be certain. So there is the possibility that the doctrine is really true despite being apparently contradictory.
 
'But then couldn't any old crazy doctrine be defended  in this way?" 
 
There are philosophers who take the eliminativist line that consciousness is an illusion. This is a crazy view that refutes itself straightaway: nothing is an illusion except to consciousness; hence, the crazy view presupposes the very thing it proposes to eliminate. Well, could one give a mysterian defense of the crazy view? I don't see how. We have direct Cartesian evidence that consciousness exists and cannot be an illusion.
 
Philosophy is long, but blog is short. So I need to wrap this up. The question is whether one can reasonably affirm mysterianism, or whether one who affirms mysterianism has succumbed to irrationality and has surrendered his intellectual integrity.  My tentative answer is that one may reasonably affirm positive mysterianism.  

Biden’s (Lack Of) Cognitive Fitness: Dems Pull a 180.

An outstanding article by Glenn Greenwald.

But, as the Democratic establishment has united with creepy speed and obedience behind Biden in order to stop the Sanders candidacy, those who now raise these concerns instantly come under a withering assault of insults and attacks from Democratic Party operatives along with their crucial media allies: thinly disguised pro-Biden reporters who continue to insist on wearing the unconvincing and fraudulent costume of neutrality. They are invoking the classic Orwellian formulation from the novel 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fever, Flu, Sickness, Old Age, and Death

Chill out toilet paper hoarders. Pour yourself a sizable shot of tequila and chase it with a Corona. You gotta die some time, WuFlu or no WuFlu.  No day without political incorrectness.  And no day without cultural appropriation, including the transpecies variety:

Transpecies cultural appropriation

Peggy Lee, Fever

The Band, Chest Fever

Johnny Rivers, Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu

Bobby Blue Bland, St. James Infirmary

Bobby Blue Bland, Goin' Down Slow. This ought to be Joe Biden's theme song.

Hank Williams, Lovesick Blues

Dr. Feelgood, Down at the Doctors

Dire Straits, Industrial Disease

Son House, Death Letter Blues

Blind Willie McTell, You Was Born to Die

Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dying

Bob Dylan, Fixin' to Die

Bob Dylan, See that My Grave is Kept Clean. "Did you ever hear that coughin'/coffin sound? Means another poor boy is under ground."

Bob Dylan with Eric Clapton, Not Dark Yet

Bob Dylan, Knockin' on Heaven's Door

“But it’s exponential!”

Peggy Noonan advertises her ignorance in this opening sentence:

This coronavirus is new to our species—it is “novel.” It spreads more easily than the flu—“exponentially,” as we now say—and is estimated to be at least 10 times as lethal.

Why is it "novel"? It is a form of flu, and it is not unique in spreading exponentially.

Noonan seems to think that 'exponentially' is some newfangled buzzword.  Not so. It has a precise mathematical meaning, and the Wuhan Flu — to use my preferred politically incorrect moniker — is not unique in spreading geometrically (exponentially) as opposed to arithmetically.

If you have forgotten, or have never learned, the difference between arithmetic and geometric progressions, Dr. Math has a simple and clear explanation for you.

Panicked over the Wuhan Flu (Wu-Flu)?

For perspective, consider that in recent years 30,000 to 40,000 Americans each year have been killed in car crashes, and that thousands and thousands die each year of various strains of influenza the names of which are not bandied-about by the 24/7/366 media.  The Maverick advises: resist group-think and mass hysteria. While taking reasonable precautions, live your life and consider what really matters. This is not to say that the COVID-19 virus is not a serious threat. It is, and it is being dealt with by a serious president who gets called a 'racist' and a 'xenophobe' for his eminently sensible travel bans. People such as Joe Biden who hurl these epithets are moral scum and need to be denounced as such.

There are things about which people should be panicked [or at least seriously concerned].

For example, the contempt for America and capitalism taught to a generation of young Americans from elementary school through college is worthy of panic. The extreme levels of economy-collapsing debt we are irresponsibly piling onto the backs of future generations to maintain “entitlements” is worthy of panic.

So is the premature sexualization of children—encouraging them to choose their own gender and taking 5-year-olds to public libraries for “Drag Queen Story Hour.”

But such things hardly register with most Americans.

I feel awful for kids today. They are relentlessly told that global warming poses an “existential threat” to life on earth. They are relentlessly told that President Donald Trump poses an “existential threat to America”—the words used, for example, a few weeks ago by Frank Rich in New York magazine, and used by the “moderate” Michael Bloomberg repeatedly in his speeches.

And now they are told their families had better stock up on toilet paper because only God knows when they will be unable to leave their homes.

It was a Democratic president who told Americans, during World War II no less, that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” He is a liberal idol, in part for saying that.

That is more or less exactly what Trump has been saying. Yet he’s an “existential threat” to our country.

Now chill out and have a beer. May I recommend a

Corona beer virusThe dude had a couple of Buds, but he was none the wiser.

Howler of the Day and a Warren Post-Mortem

"Warren gets particularly exorcised in the more recent book when talking about President Donald Trump." 

One could only hope for the exorcism of the hysterical intersectional demons in the fake Indian.

It is a good post-mortem, though, of a very capable woman whose lust for power drove her to suicide by political correctness. 

One gets the sense that Bernie Sanders doesn’t know any better. He’s not thoughtful enough to understand how much he overstates government’s ability, disciplined enough to lay out the costs of his grand proposals, or self-reflective enough to catch the irony of his own capitalistic practices. But based on her first book, it is patently clear that ElizabethWarren does understand. And that’s probably more troubling. Ignorance with self-righteousness is one thing. Knowing better and then arguing otherwise is a different sort of evil.

So what happened to Warren? My best guess—and, I think, the most gracious interpretation of her hypocritical flips—is that “the fight” became everything. And so principles, wisdom, and insight became the casualties. The ends slowly began to justify the means. Maybe losing the “bankruptcy war” to Hillary and the lobbyists embittered her. Or maybe “subsidizing the wrong people”—through the Troubled Asset Relief Program and banks that were “too big to fail”—sent her over the edge. In any case, the cause made it acceptable to strive for power.

The Opium of the Redistributionists

A re-post from April 2016 that targets the hypocrisy of Sanders the Socialist.

……………………………….

If religion is the opium of the masses, then OPM is the opium of the redistributionist.

Bernie Sanders, the superannuated socialist, "and his wife, Jane, paid an effective tax rate of 13.5 percent, or $27,653 in federal taxes on an adjusted gross income of $205,271." This is for 2014.  That is less than Mitt Romney paid, percentage-wise, in 2011.  But Romney paid more dollars and thus did more good than Bernie, if you assume that Federal taxes do good for 'the people' and not just for state apparatchiki. 

For Sanders, a legitimate function of government is wealth redistribution so that the government can do good with other people's money (OPM).  So why did Bernie take so many (legal) deductions?  Why didn't he pay his 'fair share,' say, 28% of his AGI? Why didn't he fork over 50%?  Surely an old man and his wife can live on 100K a year!  Why doesn't Bernie practice what he preaches?

Because he smokes the opium of OPM: it is the other guy's money that is to be confiscated, not his.  By any reasonable standard, Sanders is a 'fat cat.'  But he doesn't see himself as one.  And no doubt he thinks he earned his high senatorial salary when he produced nothing, but merely spouted a lot of socialist nonsense while acting the pied piper to foolish and impressionable youth.

Four Senses of ‘Absurd’

Clarity will be served if we distinguish at least the following senses of 'absurd.'  The word is from the Latin surdus, meaning deaf, silent, or stupid.  But etymology can take one only so far and is no substitute for close analysis. And beware the Dictionary Fallacy.

1) Logico-mathematical. The absurd is the logically contradictory or self-contradictory or that which entails a logical contradiction.  Absurdity in this sense attaches to propositions or sets of propositions.  A reductio ad absurdum proof, for example, is a reduction to a contradiction. It is a way of indirectly proving a proposition. One assumes its negation and then derives a logical contradiction thereby proving the proposition.

2) Semantic. The absurd as the linguistically meaningless. Meaningful words can be strung together in meaningless ways, or meaningless words can be strung together. Example of the first: "Quadruplicity drinks procrastination." (Russell)  Example of the second: "The slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe." (Lewis Carroll). There is nothing syntactically or logically wrong with these sentences.

3) Existential.  The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible.  The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Sartre's and Roquentin's  nausea.  The sheer, meaningless, disgusting, facticity of the chestnut tree referenced in the eponymous novel, for example, described by Sartre as de trop and as an unintelligible excrescence.

4) Ordinary. The absurd as the manifestly false. To be precise, 'absurd' as it is mostly used in standard English by non-philosophers refers to that which is both factually false and manifestly false. "Pelosi's assertion that there is no border crisis is absurd!" In other words, Pelosi's assertion is factually false, and plainly so.  What is manifestly false as a matter of fact needn't be logically or semantically objectionable.

Item for further rumination: In Christianity construed along Kierkegardian lines, the apparent absurdity of human existence is redeemed by the Higher Absurdity of the God-Man on the cross. 

Cultural note: the hipster depicted below is a parody of the beatniks of the late 'fifties and early 'sixties. It is what Joe Average imagined an 'existentialist' must look like: a goateed cat with a beret, dressed in black, smoking a cigarette, preferably a Gitane or an unfiltered Gaulois.

Autobiographical addendum: Things didn't work out with an early girlfriend. She complained that I was an 'existentialist' who was "down all the time." I did read a lot of Camus and Sartre in those days, but my favorite existentialists were the Dane, Kierkegaard, and the Russian, Nicholas Berdyaev. Lev Shestov came later. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger are only loosely classifiable as existentialists.

Existentialist Threat